Lately on my morning walk in Queens, I pass a front door covered in bloody handprints.

On another residential block there’s a robot in a black cape. Walk by and it shrieks like a child hysterical with terror.

Then I get to a house with half of a bloodied torso hanging out a window, and a black plastic body bag strung upside down from a tree. There’s also a severed foot sticking out of the garden.

You have a Happy Halloween, too!

Obviously this is the holiday of death and demons (and equally terrifying to some parents: Milk Duds). But these days it can feel like “It’s the Mutilated Corpse, Charlie Brown.”

How did we get here?

“It started with the pumpkins,” said Nancy McDermott, author of the book “The Problem with Parenting.”

As kids, she said, “We would get these serrated knives and make these kind of primitive faces. But then you had these spoilsports who started using carving tools, and pretty soon you had these exquisite pumpkins and it’s like, ‘Why should I even try?’”

As adults got more involved in their kids’ lives, every aspect of the holiday professionalized: parties, costumes, decorations.

Pretty soon what used to be a ghost-and-gumdrops day became an $11 billion blowout, second only to Christmas.

But while professionalization may explain the money being spent, it doesn’t explain the gore.

“Gone are the days of the 12-foot skeleton,” sighed Aneisha McMillan, marketing director at the Halloween & Costume Association.

“Now people are having to up their game, so skeletons are moving, or crazy moaning, or screaming.”

Blame it on the media. (Never a bad idea.)

“Despite the fact that I live and breathe this year-round,” McMillan said, “I got talked into seeing the latest ‘Saw’ movie and I literally thought I was going to be sick. They’re sawing someone’s arm off and your whole chair’s shaking — I had to go wait in the lobby.”

For Millennials weaned on splatter movies, it’s like growing up on squeeze pouches of smack. You keep needing a bigger dose.

That may explain why, at the Halloween Adventure store in Manhattan, “We have this animatronic girl where half of her head pops off and her mouth pops off — they kind of separate from each other,” said Mystic, the general manager.

She stocks another breed of animatronic, too: “You walk past and it lunges at you.” 

Some shoppers get so startled, she said, they wheel around and punch it.

Perhaps decoration inflation just reflects today’s cultural extremism — especially what we’re exposed to online.

The algorithms of the Internet are designed to keep us glued to our screens as long as possible. To do so, platforms serve up ever-more radical content — stunts, shocks, hate — to keep us angry and engaged.

So the severed foot in the garden? It’s just sort of the Internet of the lawn.

To get a sunnier view, I called Brian Blair, owner of the Pumpkin Pulp horror supply company.

“I don’t think it’s anything to be alarmed about — it’s a way to blow off steam,” he said cheerfully.

Phew! So what’s selling briskly this year?

“The slaughtered pig mask,” he replied. “It looks like a pig’s head has been cut off. It’s very popular.”

Well. I did ask.

“It’s just that there are no more boundaries,” offered a 35-year-old mom in Springfield, NJ, who responded to my “What’s going on?” query on X. She asked for anonymity as she described the street she accidentally took her kids down the other day.

“There’s three houses. One has a monster holding a child by the ankles. House #2 has like six Freddy Kreugers with knives. And the third house has really detailed gory zombies with pockmarks on their faces.

“My oldest kid is six and he started having nightmares.”

Great.

We already give kids almost no independence.

We barely let them walk to school, play outside, or run errands on their own. This is making them depressed and anxious like nobody’s business. (It’s also the culture I fight day and night.)

Then, on the one day of the year we let them roam, they’re lunged at by monsters dripping blood.

If we wanted to terrify kids into spending the rest of their childhoods inside on the couch, this would be a great way to do it.

Bonus: More zombies.

Lenore Skenazy is president of the nonprofit Let Grow promoting childhood independence, and founder of the Free-Range Kids movement.